Not Joes. Apache, linux, freebsd, samba, cordova, openssl, and others are invaluable but are for developers.
Exactly. And the people who write games are necessarily nerds. So the fact the jMonkeyEngine is build by and used by nerds is just fine - non-nerds do not have the skills to create games.
And prefer it to Unity, which I also use a little. The reasons I like it are:
It's platform agnostic.
It plays nice with Java and other JVM languages, including Clojure in which my AI is written
It's open source, and since if I ever get to a place where I've a releasable game I'll want to release open source that matters.
What do you need from your community? Is it feedback? Is it actual engagement (like, do you want people to take responsibility for particular bits of functionality?) It is money? Frankly I'd be happy to subscribe maybe US$100/year to help fund the development of jMonkeyEngine, provided it keeps developing and stays open source.
jMonkeyEngine has been around for years, and is pretty good. It's the engine I use for choice - and yes, I do also have Unity.
If you don't know anything about game engines, don't post your ignorance!
I know it's not really what a platform-builder wants to hear, but please use BASIC only for purposes for which it's the best tool. It's ideal for highlighting the often-missed initial concepts, such as the facts that statements are executed in order, variables can store information and change...
In declarative languages instructions are not executed in order (indeed, modern compilers frequently reorder instructions and, as we progressively move away from Von Neumann architectures, very few computing environments will guarantee instructions are executed in order). In functional languages variables cannot change. If those are the ideas you've internalised about software, you aren't going to go very far.
BASIC is just the ultimate bad language. Like King John, it has no redeeming features.
BASIC is a really, really bad language to teach anything about computing. If you want to equip them for the world of work, go for Java or C# (which are more or less the same, from a learner's point of view, and neither is hard). If you want to teach a deep understanding of algorithms and how computers work, Clojure or Scheme would be good choices.
I currently work for a small (50 employees) engineering company. One person in my present team's weekly standup is in Montreal, Canada. Three are in New York, USA. Three are in London, England. The rest are in Glasgow, Scotland. In my last job, with a major international bank, one standup member was in Chennai, India; three in Geneva, Switzerland. One in London, England. And the rest in Glasgow. In the real world 'everyone in one room' just isn't going to happen.
I imagine, using standard journalists' practice, the Guardian phoned up the NSA and said 'we've found this in your documents. Would you like to comment?' That's what professional journalists do.
If you're trying to determine what the file type of a file is from an extension on the end of its name, you're engaging in industrial archaelology, not computer use. You can rename any file to have any 'extension'; consequently this idea is completely broken. The idea that you deal with this misfeature by hiding it just compounds the error.
The Web is in the mess it now is because Microsoft (and, to a lesser extent, Netscape, back in the day) has gone through so many iterations of deliberately trying to create subtly incompatible variants of HTML. Creating a browser which is backwards compatible with that mess simply perpetuates the mess. The new browser should simply refuse to render non-conforming legacy pages at all - that would force web site owners to clean up their act in short order.
Speaking as someone who's been following this story as it developed, it seems to me that the data that has been 'lost' is data the high heid yins of Scotland's police were very eager to lose. They'd been acting beyond their remit - and probably beyond the law - and they knew it.
So I suspect someone with scrambled egg on their hat took that programmer into a quiet room and said 'you will make an unfortunate error this afternoon, or we'll be sending the boys round'. I'm pretty sure the government suspect the same.
Heads will, I suspect, roll - and I don't think they will be the heads of programmers.
It was 1993 for me. And I moved to Linux from, guess what, BSD. I've never gone back and I don't plan to.
Yes, I really have been using Linux as my main operating system for more than twenty years, and I still haven't found anything better. And Linux, in 1993, was just a reimplementation of UNIX, which is forty years old. Software evolves so bloody slowly!
Scheme doesn't have unreadable syntax; that's a category error. Scheme does not have syntax. That's the difference. What you're editing is the raw parse tree; and that's a significant part of what makes Scheme (and other homoiconic languages) so powerful.
From that they got 100 million lines of Java code and tossed out simple methods (those with less than 50 tokens).
Good coding style is to decompose your problem thoroughly, so your methods will be very small. Indeed, using this methodology, the more you refactor the greater proportion of so called 'chaff' you'll get.
I'm not arguing with the general propositions that
Java is an extraordinarily prolix language, and
These days, most Java is exceedingly poorly written
But this study doesn't show it, because it arbitrarily tossed away the better-written code and then analysed the remainder.
My experience is that freelancers - at least those with a good few projects under their belt - tend to have higher coding standards in the first place, and are more adaptable to different coding standards than permanent staff. Good freelancers are used to, and skilled at, learning and adapting to new stuff.
Tail Call Optimisation is not implemented in Clojure, and the reason given in the documentation is precisely that interoperability with Java prevents this. Instead there's a recur special form, which, in my opinion, is a bit of an ugly hack.
In most current compilers for ALGOL derived imperative programming languages (such as C, Java, C#, Pascal...), it's true, because, TRADITION! But it's not true of the underlying hardware, and it's not true of any compiler which implements its stack as a linked list. In principle there is no reason at all why you should not allocate all your available store to stack. There's also no reason why you cannot dynamically implement your stack in your heap.
These are all language (and run-time) design choices, and just because the people who specified ALGOL in 1958 - when I was three, goddammit - were working on machines which were (by modern standards) desperately poor of both mill and store, doesn't mean that we need to continue to copy the design choices they made then.
The point of a Raspberry Pi isn't to replace an Intel i7 clocked at 3GHz, it's to replace a 6502 clocked at 2MHz: to provide kids with a system to hack on. You don't need shedloads of performance to develop great software, and, indeed, the less resource you have, the more inclined you are to code tightly and efficiently. As a learning tool, less really can be more.
Slashdot Mirror
I think software by nerds is for nerds.
Not Joes. Apache, linux, freebsd, samba, cordova, openssl, and others are invaluable but are for developers.
Exactly. And the people who write games are necessarily nerds. So the fact the jMonkeyEngine is build by and used by nerds is just fine - non-nerds do not have the skills to create games.
And prefer it to Unity, which I also use a little. The reasons I like it are:
What do you need from your community? Is it feedback? Is it actual engagement (like, do you want people to take responsibility for particular bits of functionality?) It is money? Frankly I'd be happy to subscribe maybe US$100/year to help fund the development of jMonkeyEngine, provided it keeps developing and stays open source.
jMonkeyEngine has been around for years, and is pretty good. It's the engine I use for choice - and yes, I do also have Unity. If you don't know anything about game engines, don't post your ignorance!
I know it's not really what a platform-builder wants to hear, but please use BASIC only for purposes for which it's the best tool. It's ideal for highlighting the often-missed initial concepts, such as the facts that statements are executed in order, variables can store information and change...
In declarative languages instructions are not executed in order (indeed, modern compilers frequently reorder instructions and, as we progressively move away from Von Neumann architectures, very few computing environments will guarantee instructions are executed in order). In functional languages variables cannot change. If those are the ideas you've internalised about software, you aren't going to go very far.
BASIC is just the ultimate bad language. Like King John, it has no redeeming features.
By the time these kids grow up, "programming skills" will be obsolete.
That's what they told me when I was at school. I'll be sixty this year. I don't see programming becoming obsolete any time soon.
BASIC is a really, really bad language to teach anything about computing. If you want to equip them for the world of work, go for Java or C# (which are more or less the same, from a learner's point of view, and neither is hard). If you want to teach a deep understanding of algorithms and how computers work, Clojure or Scheme would be good choices.
I currently work for a small (50 employees) engineering company. One person in my present team's weekly standup is in Montreal, Canada. Three are in New York, USA. Three are in London, England. The rest are in Glasgow, Scotland. In my last job, with a major international bank, one standup member was in Chennai, India; three in Geneva, Switzerland. One in London, England. And the rest in Glasgow. In the real world 'everyone in one room' just isn't going to happen.
I imagine, using standard journalists' practice, the Guardian phoned up the NSA and said 'we've found this in your documents. Would you like to comment?' That's what professional journalists do.
If you're trying to determine what the file type of a file is from an extension on the end of its name, you're engaging in industrial archaelology, not computer use. You can rename any file to have any 'extension'; consequently this idea is completely broken. The idea that you deal with this misfeature by hiding it just compounds the error.
The Web is in the mess it now is because Microsoft (and, to a lesser extent, Netscape, back in the day) has gone through so many iterations of deliberately trying to create subtly incompatible variants of HTML. Creating a browser which is backwards compatible with that mess simply perpetuates the mess. The new browser should simply refuse to render non-conforming legacy pages at all - that would force web site owners to clean up their act in short order.
Not actually true. Ultra-orthodox Jews do not (yet) have to serve in the army.
<sarcasm>After all, the ultra-orthodox never provoke any trouble with the Palestinians, so why should they contribute to defence?</sarcasm>
Speaking as someone who's been following this story as it developed, it seems to me that the data that has been 'lost' is data the high heid yins of Scotland's police were very eager to lose. They'd been acting beyond their remit - and probably beyond the law - and they knew it.
So I suspect someone with scrambled egg on their hat took that programmer into a quiet room and said 'you will make an unfortunate error this afternoon, or we'll be sending the boys round'. I'm pretty sure the government suspect the same.
Heads will, I suspect, roll - and I don't think they will be the heads of programmers.
I can't say five good things about Windows, and I've worked on every version since Windows 2.0.
Dammit, I don't think I can say one good thing about Windows.
Those of us who actually worked on NeXT will never touch MacOS X with a barge pole. I still have nightmares about that steaming pile of shit.
It was 1993 for me. And I moved to Linux from, guess what, BSD. I've never gone back and I don't plan to.
Yes, I really have been using Linux as my main operating system for more than twenty years, and I still haven't found anything better. And Linux, in 1993, was just a reimplementation of UNIX, which is forty years old. Software evolves so bloody slowly!
Scheme doesn't have unreadable syntax; that's a category error. Scheme does not have syntax. That's the difference. What you're editing is the raw parse tree; and that's a significant part of what makes Scheme (and other homoiconic languages) so powerful.
From the article:
Good coding style is to decompose your problem thoroughly, so your methods will be very small. Indeed, using this methodology, the more you refactor the greater proportion of so called 'chaff' you'll get.
I'm not arguing with the general propositions that
But this study doesn't show it, because it arbitrarily tossed away the better-written code and then analysed the remainder.
My experience is that freelancers - at least those with a good few projects under their belt - tend to have higher coding standards in the first place, and are more adaptable to different coding standards than permanent staff. Good freelancers are used to, and skilled at, learning and adapting to new stuff.
Tail Call Optimisation is not implemented in Clojure, and the reason given in the documentation is precisely that interoperability with Java prevents this. Instead there's a recur special form, which, in my opinion, is a bit of an ugly hack.
(apply str (take 7 (range)))
This is kind of nonsense.
In most current compilers for ALGOL derived imperative programming languages (such as C, Java, C#, Pascal...), it's true, because, TRADITION! But it's not true of the underlying hardware, and it's not true of any compiler which implements its stack as a linked list. In principle there is no reason at all why you should not allocate all your available store to stack. There's also no reason why you cannot dynamically implement your stack in your heap.
These are all language (and run-time) design choices, and just because the people who specified ALGOL in 1958 - when I was three, goddammit - were working on machines which were (by modern standards) desperately poor of both mill and store, doesn't mean that we need to continue to copy the design choices they made then.
That's a particularly stupid response, even for Slashdot. Since all iteration can be implemented as recursion, why ever use iteration?
Because some problems are more clearly expressed as iteration and some as recursion.
Try, for example, to describe in normal everyday language a route planning algorithm using iteration. Here it is using recursion:
When you consider that the i386 on which I first ran Linux back in 93 could manage about 15 BogoMIPS, that's ridiculously powerful!
The point of a Raspberry Pi isn't to replace an Intel i7 clocked at 3GHz, it's to replace a 6502 clocked at 2MHz: to provide kids with a system to hack on. You don't need shedloads of performance to develop great software, and, indeed, the less resource you have, the more inclined you are to code tightly and efficiently. As a learning tool, less really can be more.
So download the sources and compile it yourself!